Month: May 2016

Morning in the Desert is quite peaceful.

5/30/2016

Today is different.  Water is so scarce in this part of California that the PCT association organizes a live water report.  They basically crowd source data on each water source and if it is flowing, what the quality is, etc.  It is maintained on a Google doc so you can either print it out or view it live.  I have had to view it live because water sources are drying up constantly.

I have just entered a stretch where so many water sources have dried up that there is 30 miles between sources.  And I actually screwed up my planning so I am carrying 12 liters of water over 41 miles.  That’s about 24 lbs just in water.

Let me tell you I can feel that weight.  I’m only carrying 3 1/2 days of food, otherwise it just wouldn’t physically fit inside the pack.

The hiking strategy changes when you are carrying that much water.  Instead of hiking all day, I will be walking only in the mornings and evenings and taking an extended siesta during the day.  I hiked about 17 miles this morning, 12 of that with all the water.  The plan was to hike until 2 and then stop for the afternoon.  But at about 1:45 I stumbled across a meadow with a single oak tree in it about 300 yds off the trail, so I made a beeline for it.  I was not the first to see the tree, as the grass was worn down all the way to it and under it.

Could that be a shade tree off in the distance?

Yes, that is a lovely shade tree. I think I’ll have a rest.

So here I sit under the only shade tree I have seen since about 9 AM, taking a nap and fixing late lunch/early dinner.  I charged the phone up and slept for about an hour.

Great place for lunch and a nap.

There is a very cool breeze, so I am actually wearing my rain jacket just to stay warm.  You read that right, I am wearing a jacket in the desert in the middle of the day because I have found a wonderful shade tree.  The rocks are radiating heat still, so I know it’s still hot on the trail itself.  I will wait until about 5 or 6 PM, then I will saddle up and hike another 5 hours or so, the last 2 being in the dark.  All this just to avoid the heat.  I will get up before 4 tomorrow and start hiking before the sun comes up and hike until noon or 1 PM.  I should be able to make it to within about 5 miles of the next water, which is a stocked cache of gallon jugs in the woods.

Very good camouflage in the desert.

I can tell I’m not too far from Los Angeles because the entire Western sky is a soft glow.  To the east it’s pitch black and I can see a good number of stars in that direction.

My socks keep my feet clean, but not my toes, and the dust goes straight up my pants legs.

Early morning is my favorite time to hike.

5/29/2016

Today was a cornucopia of terrain.  I had camped in a lowland flat prairie, then had to climb the typical desert scrub I have been seeing since the border, but then there was a small stretch that had what Karen and I call beach trees (small twisted oak trees) and actually ran across the first two natural water sources of the entire trip, then finished the day in a highland ponderosa pine prairie.

Yummy water source

I got out a little later today, perhaps 6 AM.  I went by a state forest campground that had horse pens at most of the campsites which was pretty cool.  About half the sites were full but no horses.  There was supposedly water there, but I never found it and luckily, I did not need it.

Horse pens at Boulder Oaks equine campgrounds in Cleveland National Forest.

I didn’t realize how much of the day was spent climbing until I looked at the map afterwards but the bulk of the day was a steady uphill climb.  The trail is graded so you know you are going uphill for sure, but it’s not so steep that you think your chest is going to explode.  There are still some rocks to dodge, but nothing as annoying as the AT in that regards.

View of the highway during a snack break and phone stop.

I took breaks every two hours or so and nibbled on food and drank water and Powerade.  It was definitely a much hotter day, but I used the umbrella pretty early on and it really did make a noticeable difference.  It made it feel ten degrees cooler.  I was the envy of the trail as I met southbound hikers who said it was a smart idea and wished they had one.  One couple said they took theirs out of their packs before this trip and now regretted it.  I was sure glad to have it.

One of the people I met today is Peter, who just finished his thesis in Poland and is out seeing the world before he has to enter the real world.  I actually saw him heading to the border monument as the three of us were leaving it.  I also met him very briefly yesterday in the campground as I was headed over to the restroom area.  But today we met around noon and ended up hiking the rest of the day together and camping together in a pine meadow just past Mt Laguna.

One of the highlights of the day is when we climbed from 5800 ft and crossed up to 6000 ft.  The landscape changed dramatically.  Instead of being mountain desert, it was meadows and ponderosa pines.  It seemed like familiar places in northern new Mexico or Colorado.  It seems backwards in my head.  On the east coast, higher means smaller trees that can survive harsher weather.  In the desert, higher means taller trees that get more rain.

The ponderosa pine emits a wonderful vanilla aroma.

On this high ground is the small town of Laguna Mountain. The post office and it’s store was closed, but the restaurant, outfitters, and showers were open.  We skipped past the showers and headed straight for the restaurant.  Sine we arrived at 3 PM, it seemed like eating was the appropriate thing to do.  A hamburger, salad, and beer later it was time to head to the outfitters.

Peter also had umbrella envy and the next six days are supposed to get gradually hotter, so we stopped at the outfitter.  We have a thirty mile stretch coming up without water, so keeping cool is going to be important.  It was a really neat outfitter and I found all sorts of neat stuff in the hiker box to supplement my food with.  It reminded me of a surf shop, but with hiking gear.  At only 40 miles into the trail, I bet this guy does a great business.  [Post hike:  The owner’s name is Dave, and “getting Daved” is a well known phenomenon where people magically buy things they probably don’t need, but weary bodies want.]

I’m a half day short on food to get to my first PO resupply so I found a few good things to supplement from the outfitters hiker box.  He also had cool drinks in a cooler for hikers.  I was planning on topping off food at the store connected to the PO, but it was closed, so I was glad to find a few things in the hiker box to eat.  I was also able to find a sheet of tyvek that someone had discarded – SCORE!  Now I can make a perfect ground sheet.

We got out of town a bit late, so we stopped only 2 or 3 miles out of town to camp.  I made curry lentil rice that I got from the hiker box and it was really hot.  Now I know why they ditched it.  I put peanut butter in it to tone it down and seem like Thai food and that helped, but I just could not eat it all and had to bury about a quarter of it.  The first time ever I have not been able to finish a meal while hiking.

I think we have about ten miles before we hit the stretch that begins thirty consecutive miles without water.  We have been carrying water for 20 mile stretches, but 30 is more.  And I don’t just mean 10 more, it will probably feel like 20 more.

Carrying water isn’t linear, it’s exponential.  The more you carry, the more it tires you out and thus the more you need to drink.

I have the capacity to carry 12 liters, but I will probably only carry 9.  30 miles requires 6 for the distance, plus half a liter each night to camp, and two more for safety in case it’s really hot.

The view of the desert from Mt Laguna.

We had some cloud cover later in the day today, but the next week is supposed to be sunny.  We will be getting up early and probably stop hiking from noon to five then hike again until dark and keep hiking some after dark just to avoid the heat.  Fun times.

There may not be water, but the desert is full of plant life.

5/28/2016

Counting days is hard when you don’t have a 9 to 5 to synchronize you so I am going to start blogging in terms of mile markers instead of days.  Yesterday I camped just short of the 3 mile marker and today was a full day indeed.

I awoke at 3 AM rip roaring and ready to go… because I am still on East coast time. But I slept a bit more and didn’t roust until 4:45.  I slept quite soundly all night and even didn’t have any problem sleeping later.  It was well needed rest since the travel day was so brutal.

I ate an apple pie I bought yesterday and is was a good solid breakfast.  The moon was shaded by trees by the time I awoke, but to my surprise, the dawn was already glowing slightly.  By the time I got going at 5:30 it was full pre-sunrise brightness.  I crossed a railroad track before sunrise and it had a Disneyesque look to it.  It looked fake, but it was real indeed.

It looks like a Disney set, but it’s a real railroad running through a real desert.

The morning walking through the desert was quite cool but zero breeze at all.  The landscape was so foreign to me.  The plants were like none I had ever seen.  I saw two different shrubs that have blood red bark and the woody parts look identical but the leaves are totally different.  One has one inch oblong leaves like mini sea grapes and has small berries.  The other looks like juniper with nearly identical scaly leaves.

Such an interesting tree with blood red bark and green leaves.

One section had small flowers in bloom and the air was very sweet with their aroma.  Other sections with blooms had no aroma at all.

The desert had more flowering plants than I was expecting.

This shrub has whispy threads all over it. We don’t have these on the east coast.

One of the dangerous plants here is called poodle dog bush and it’s highly toxic like poison ivy on steroids.  It is green and stalky with purple flowers.  Looks harmless.  I had only seem it in the books, but I saw three different stalky plants with purple flowers.  One attribute of this plant is that is one of the first things to surface in a burn area.  Around mile 8-ish I entered a burn area and I finally saw it.  There were several dead bushes that looked like someone nailed them with herbicide.  But one of them had one green stalk and on it were purple flowers.  I am certain that it was poodle dog bush and the maintainers had killed them but that one bush had a single surviving stalk.  At least now I know what to look for.  I never saw any more.

Post Hike: This is the plant that I assumed was poodle dog bush, but the leaves are flat and curvy. I later saw the textbook perfect poodle dog bush. I still have not verified if this is a variant of poodle dog bush or not, but I don’t think that it is.

I started getting hungry and a little tired around 9 AM so I started snacking.  Since the day yesterday was so messed up and I never really ate dinner, I think I was a little short on juice.  At mile 20 was a campground and store that I wanted to reach for lunch and thought I would hit it at about 1 PM.

By 11:00 I came to a gully that was the end of a long descent and the start of a big climb.  There was a nice shade tree and a sunny patch so I laid the tarp out in the sun to dry and unrolled my pad in the shade to eat lunch.  I ate pepperoni and cheese-its and drank a whole liter of Powerade.  I lounged a good forty minutes letting my feet air out.

I set out on the climb knowing that the next five miles to lake Morena campground would tire me out.  It was warm out, but my hat and white long sleeve shirt kept me cool enough that I didn’t bother to use the umbrella.

The last mile into the campground I was hot and tired.  It had been about 17 miles and I got there at 1:45, pretty close to my estimate.

I rested a few minutes, then headed straight for the deli 0.4 mile down the road after hiding my pack in the woods.  I ate a cheeseburger and fries like I hadn’t eaten in weeks.  I ordered a BLT to go for dinner and bought a Squirt and a pint of ice cream for dessert.  I took the ice cream back to my pack to let it warm a little before eating it on my pad stretched out on a huge rock.

I napped about an hour until I loaded up and made my way to the restrooms where I could charge my phone.  All the excitement of the buses and hitchhiking yesterday had me down below 40%.  I charged a little over an hour while lounging under a tree and set out at 5 PM to try to bang out another five or so in the cooler air.

Looks like an inviting field to camp in, right? Not so fast! This grass has seed heads with barbs on it that tenaciously stick to and go through everything – including a tent floor. Camper beware.

In the afternoons, the breeze helps to cool things off a bit.  I think I made it another four or so before I was tired and just wanted to make camp and rest more. There is another campground about the same distance away tomorrow, so no need to go too far tonight.  Time for a BLT and some shuteye.

Starting the PCT in my Chi-Chi Rodriguez hat at sunset on May 27, 2016.

5/27/2016

I’m not sure if I should call this day 0 or 1.  It started at 4 am (1 am Pacific time) and didn’t end until 9 PM – a loooooong 20 hour day.  Most hikers travel one day and start the trail the next day or the day after.

Karen dropped me off at 4:45 am at the Jacksonville airport.  The baggage check-in took longer than expected and they rushed me to the front after fifteen minutes of waiting.  I was hoping I could carry the pack as carry-on luggage, but its just too darned tall to fit when it is fully packed.  So I checked the pack as luggage and carried a small food bag with documents and the foam pad.  Then the TSA screening line wrapped back at least eight or ten times.  It went quickly, though and I got to the gate with plenty of time to spare.  They were already boarding so I just walked right onto the plane.

And then the pilot announced that the previous crew reported some issues so there was a maintenance crew working on the plane.  We were delayed perhaps 30 to 40 minutes but I still had plenty of time to make my connection in Dallas.  During the flight he made up a boatload of time and I think we ended up only about 10 minutes late.  I still had well over an hour in Dallas, so I just walked C terminal for most of it.  Then the gate announced that one of our flight attendants was sick and a sub was flying in.  Then they announced she was at gate D.  Then another half hour later she was sick, too, so they were getting another one.  Needless to say, two hours later they said we finally had a crew and we could board, and that more bad weather was expected shortly.  But we did take off about two hours late and he made up some time, too.  Since the flight taking our plane was also two hours late, the cleaning crew began work immediately. When only first class had deplaned, they immediately started gleaning away with a four person crew.

A bad weather day to fly, but I made it to San Diego with just enough time to run errands, but no sightseeing.

There were only two possible buses to get to Campo for the next THREE days because of Memorial Day weekend, so arriving in San Diego late made me quite nervous.

I still had chores to run – I had no stove fuel and no hat.   I was also getting hungry, but too full of adrenaline to be hangry.  There was not a lot of buffer in the schedule, so I had to hustle.

The pack was waiting for me almost immediately after getting to the baggage pickup so that went smoothly.  I repacked things and filled my four water bottles and headed for the bus.  The San Diego MTS website said that I could not buy a day pass at the airport but there was a kiosk right next to the information booth.  That went quickly, I got on the bus to the downtown station after only waiting about two minutes and got there in about fifteen minutes driving along the waterfront.  Getting to the trolley interchange was a piece of cake and less than five minutes later I was on the orange trolley.  That ride took a good forty five minutes to the main El Cajon bus terminal.

The excellent trolley in San Diego

I had about an hour and a half to wait for the bus to Campo and still had to run to the Big 5 sporting goods to pick up stove fuel and a hat.  The bus that should have been there to go to the mall was late so I found an alternate bus and took that one instead.  When I got off the bus, there was a Dicks sporting goods on my side of the road instead of crossing so i went to Dicks instead.  Finding the fuel was easy, but finding a hat was not.  Dicks has the annoying habit of scattering their hats all over the place.  I wanted a straw one but all their men’s straw hats were too big (to fit my head snugly).  Why do they only order one size?  I even looked at ladies hats, but they were all too flagrantly ladylike.  Even asking the staff for help it was not easy.  I finally discovered that the best hats are in the golf section.  I found a nice baseball hat, visor, and straw hat.  I opted for the straw hat so it would protect my ears.  I have an umbrella but I might not want to use it all the time so I opted for more protection.  It makes me look like Chi-chi Rodriguez.

Two cliff bars later I was on my way but only had half an hour to catch the 3 PM bus for Campo and I still had not eaten lunch so I made a quick stop at Five Guys.  I was hoping to hit one of the many great breweries or brewpubs in San Diego but I just did not have the time.  The burger was good and the fries taste so great, but the quantities are ridiculous.  I ate only half the fries and ditched them because I only had 15 minutes to get back to the bus depot and it’s a ten minute ride.  Google transit is quite good and led me straight to the bus stop on the other side of the mall.

When I got to the stop I noticed that the rural bus I needed to catch also stopped at this exact stop.  By the schedule it should have been there already but I was hoping it was late.  All the real-time bus info and app did not seem to actually be real-time but more of a simulation based on the schedules.  The bus to the terminal arrived first, so I got on that one to play it safe.  I got to the terminal one minute after the bus was supposed to be there but no bus.  It arrived five minutes late.  I was really anxious to make this bus since there was only one more bus two hours later and I did not want to waste more time.

A huge weight was lifted when I finally boarded the bus to Campo.

Once boarded, I found out the fare was $10 not $5 but that still seemed reasonable for a two hour bus ride.  The bus was packed and two other PCT hikers were on board.  One was from Washington state and the other was from Switzerland.  As the bus progressed through the outskirts it kept picking up more and more people.  I was able to get a seat in the back but there were many who had to stand.  Everyone was very polite and younger kids got up when an older person got on.  After close to an hour of riding, I was getting nauseous from the curves, being in a hot bus and those damn grease bomb fries.  I closed my eyes for ten minutes and when I opened them, the suburbs had vanished and desert mountain countryside was everywhere.  It was gorgeous.  And then the bus slammed on brakes.  There was an accident up ahead where two cars hit head on.  It took us a few minutes to get around it, but we did.  we later found out that there was a fatality at the accident and that the road had been shut down as soon as the rescue crew arrived on scene.  That little part is important later on.

Now that my attention was on the bus ride again, I was able to enjoy the scenery as it whipped by.  The driver was really driving the heck out of that bus on the curvy mountain roads.  Then ten minutes later he goes screeching off the side of the road.  I noticed as he pulled over the engine was no longer running.  I could also smell all sorts of clutchy braky smells.  The driver said the engine had overheated and shut itself off and that coolant was leaking out of it.  They were going to send a replacement bus but it would not arrive for three hours.  Heck, the next scheduled bus could get there before that.  But it turns out that with the road closed behind us, there might not be another bus… Or a replacement one.  After an hour, the driver said they indeed were not sending a replacement bus but a repair truck and then a different bus might pick us up in another three hours.

The bus broke down with 16 miles left to Campo and no traffic for hitching a ride.

The heck with that.  Two thirds of the bus had hitched on, and now us (the two other hikers) and the last eight passengers decided to do the same.  We were able to get a car to pull over every five minutes but we let the locals take the first rides.  We were only 16 miles from our destination but it was a dangerous road to walk so we kept waiting for a hitch.  We did get a ride, but only half way.

The driver dropped us off at a small store so we could hopefully get a ride from there.  But the problem is that we were now so far down the remote road and the blocked highway allowed even less traffic to grab a hitch.  There were simply no cars to hitch from that were going our direction.

We ended up chatting with a guy at the store (and every patron as they came by) but this one guy was just off the wall.  He was chatting up a storm and kept trying to convince us that the border was only 400 yds away and we should just start there instead of going the last 9 miles to the real start.  He was talking some crazy stuff and as we got closer to him we realized why.  He was drunk.  So after a half an hour of unsuccessful hitching, this guy finally talked us into the notion that he would just drive us to the border.  We never could really figure out where he was going to take us, but he was headed in the right direction and there’s no turns on the way.  So we got in a tiny car with a drunk guy (and a fresh quart of Coors) and his dog who was going to drive us down a small twisty mountain road.

As it turned out, where he ended up taking us was exactly where we wanted to go… to the store in Campo.  So after a quick thank you to get away from him as quickly as possible, we loaded up and were on our way.  The three of us had ridden the bus to together, hitched together, so we might as well hike together.

Hiking along a gravel road towards Mexico.

We had to walk about two miles along the road (a quiet one) to get to the border right as the sun was setting.  We spent a good twenty minutes taking pictures for each other and as the sun got lower the pictures got more interesting.  There’s something magical about sunset in the desert.  Enough light remained so that we could begin our hike northward.

Say hello to Mexico!

Does Donald Trump know there is already a wall between the US and Mexico in some places?

Just enough light to see the border with Mexico.

The journey begins. Canada is a mere 2650 miles ahead.

I had planned on going back to the store and camping at the museum next door that allows hikers to camp for free.  I was too tired to deal with reading the maps to look for a camping spot.  But we missed the last road back to the store so we hiked on.  The first mile is decorated with an impressive marker, so a quick picture was required.  It got dark very quickly, so during the second mile we stopped to get them out.

Less than twenty minutes into the hike, we hit our first milestone – 1 mile!

Night hiking by headlamp on the very first day.

After three quick miles, we came to a dry stream bed with campsites so I decided to stop and make camp and the other two went on.   They wanted to do about ten miles of night hiking, but I’m more interested in getting rest.

After what amounted to a 20 hour day after getting only five hours of sleep, I didn’t bother to cook dinner – I wanted to sleep.

A hiker we saw pass us going to the border near the one mile marker as we walked north walked by just before I fell asleep.  I didn’t know it at the time, but I was to meet him again later and hike and camp with him a few times.

It was a good zeroth and first day but I’m looking forward to tomorrow even more.